Open Source OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali GPUs with Panfrost

Panfrost, the open source driver for Arm Mali, now supports OpenGL ES 3.1 on both Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) and Bifrost (Mali G31, G52, G76) GPUs. OpenGL ES 3.1 adds a number of features on top of OpenGL ES 3.0, notably including compute shaders. While Panfrost has had limited support for compute shaders on Midgard for use in TensorFlow Lite, the latest work extends the support to more GPUs and adds complementary features required by the OpenGL ES 3.1 specification, like indirect draws and no-attachment framebuffers.The new feature support represents the cumulative effort of multiple Collaborans -- Boris Brezillon, Italo Nicola, and myself -- in tandem with the wider Mesa community. With a Vulkan driver in the works, Panfrost's API support is looking good.Since the last Panfrost update, we've added an instruction scheduler to the Bifrost compiler. Coming up with good heuristics is tricky, and we have a great deal of room to grow in Panfrost, but the basic model is serving us well so far.Another large change to the driver since our last blog was the addition of dirty tracking, a common graphics driver optimization with a twist for Mali. Next stop after that: Bifrost performance improvements and introducing support for the modern Valhall (Mali G77 and newer) architecture family.Allowed tags: <b><i><br>Add a new comment:11/06/2021Panfrost, the open source driver for Arm Mali, now supports OpenGL ES 3.1 on both Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) and Bifrost (Mali G31, G52,…17/05/2021Collabora has been investing into Perfetto to enable driver authors & users to get deep insights into driver internals and GPU performance.…11/05/2021The Hantro Video4Linux2 (V4L2) kernel module has gained support for another SoC!